The present invention relates to a front attachment for harvesting stalked plants.
DE 197 34 747 made known a corn-harvesting front attachment of the type in question for installation on a self-propelled harvesting machine and that includes stalk-cutting mechanisms—which operate independently of the distance between rows—upstream of picking assemblies that separate the corn cobs from the plants and convey them to a separate utilization. In one variant of the embodiment, the picking assemblies, each of which is composed of picking rollers that operate in pairs, are located downstream of the particular stalk-cutting mechanism in a manner such that they extend substantially transversely to the longitudinal direction of the self-propelled harvesting machine. The plant stalks, which are harvested by the stalk-cutting mechanism and conveyed to the rear region thereof, are caught by a rotatably driven removal element which is assigned to the stalk-cutting mechanism in this region, and are transferred to the picking assemblies in the intake region thereof.
To ensure that the stalks may be reliably seized by the stalk-cutting mechanism and conveyed to the rear region thereof, the conveyor disks of the stalk-cutting mechanism include pocket-shaped recesses in which the stalks are held securely against the effect of centrifugal force. Due to this aggressive structure of the conveyor pockets, however, the rotational speeds of the stalk-cutting mechanism and the particular removal element located downstream thereof must be matched precisely to each other so that the stalks are transferred from the stalk-cutting mechanism to the particular picking assembly without causing material-flow problems. A control that is designed for this purpose is complicated and expensive. To ensure that every cutting and conveyor disk also has a relatively large working width, cutting and conveyor disks having a large diameter are used. Cutting and conveyor disks having this type of design also have the disadvantage that they must convey large quantities of crop material, which, in the case of high rates of crop-material throughput, results in material-conveyance problems since the conveying capacity is often lower than would be required for high rates of crop-material throughput.
A simplified means of conveying material for front attachments of that type was made known in DE 10 2005 021 792. The conveyor disks described therein include V-shaped recesses that offer no resistance to the effect of centrifugal force, and therefore removal elements are not required to transfer the plant stalks from the cutting and conveying mechanisms to the downstream picking assemblies, which are also situated transversely to the longitudinal direction of the agricultural harvesting machine. Stalk-cutting mechanisms designed in this manner have the disadvantage, however, that the plant stalks are likely to fall out of the conveyor pockets, due to the centrifugal force acting on them, as they travel from the front harvesting region to the rear transfer region. When crop-material throughput rates are low in particular, this may cause the plant stalks to fall out of the conveyor elements before they are seized by the picking assemblies, which ultimately results in considerable material-flow problems.